The moral significance of a finite lifespan

Nigel Warburton, On going on and on and on, Aeon:

In his essay ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’ (1973), the English moral philosopher Bernard Williams suggested that living forever would be awful, akin to being trapped in a never-ending cocktail party. This was because after a certain amount of living, human life would become unspeakably boring. We need new experiences in order to have reasons to keep on going. But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating. We would lack what Williams called ‘categorical’ desires: ie, desires that give us reasons to keep on living, and instead possess only ‘contingent’ desires: ie, things that we might as well want to do if we’re alive, but aren’t enough on their own to motivate us to stay alive. For example, if I’m going to carry on living, then I desire to have my tooth cavity filled – but I don’t want to go on living simply in order to have my cavity filled. By contrast, I might well want to carry on living so as to finish the grand novel that I’ve been composing for the past 25 years. The former is a contingent, the latter a categorical, desire.

But there's more to it, surely. Doesn't life have a shape?

The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value – and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life – must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what it would be like to be immortal, if we find that an amusing way to pass the time. But doing so will obscure a basic truth: that because death is a fixed fact, everything that human beings value makes sense only in light of our time being finite, our choices being limited, and our each getting only so many goes before it’s all over.

Scheffler’s case is thus not simply that immortality would make us miserable (although it probably would). It’s that, if we had it, we would cease to be distinctively human in the way that we currently are. But then, if we were somehow to attain immortality, it wouldn’t get us what we want from it: namely, for it to be some version of our human selves that lives forever. A desire for immortality is thus a paradox: it would frustrate itself were it ever to be achieved. In turn, Scheffler implies, once we’ve reflected carefully on this deep fact about ourselves, we should junk any residual desire to live forever that we might still have.

Is that all there is to it? Warburton thinks not, but...Final paragraph:

Immortality is, obviously enough, an impossible fantasy – hence it cannot be a genuine solution to the unfortunate yet elemental facts of the human condition, nor an answer to the fraught complexities surrounding euthanasia as regards both social policy and moral judgment. Nonetheless, the reason such a fantasy endures in popular imagination – as well as being a target for philosophical reflection – is that it taps into something important about our attitudes towards death. We are not simply afraid of death, we also resent it, because it is experienced as an assault on our personal agency. We can fully control our own deaths in only one direction – and that, of course, is usually no comfort at all.

Not very convincing.

More work to do.

Those I have met in the Amazon, poor Brazilians and indigenous peoples, are far less concerned by this. None of them see natural death as an affront or a violation of their rights. Good to reflect on this.https://t.co/sJApFsnkk9

— Daniel Everett (@amazonrambler) September 4, 2018